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Thursday, January 29, 2015

RATIONING MEDICARE

Earlier this month the Obama administration met with medical providers namely insurance companies to announce a new plan to ration services given to Medicare patients. The plan will ration doctors , hospital, and drugs given to these patients.

Strangely not one word of this has been seen in the conventional press and once again had to rely on the Net to provide the information.

Being an old couple , my wife and I have enjoyed having three insurance plans and have an almost 0 medical expenses. Now I have to worry how this change will affect us. I already have seen how this works with private health insurances limiting the services a doctor can provide. One example I know of an older man needed a hip replacement , there were several surgeons locally that could do the work but the insurance company insisted that their the only surgeon on their list be used. The guy had a very bad track record. Even though my doc fought hard he lost.. Fortunately the group he belonged to quit servicing those companies.

With mergers taken place throughout health services they become bigger bullies with each merger. A personal example was with medications I have taken for many years, of course cheaper drugs became available and they wanted me to switch, I would try but had reactions to these new drugs and had to fight to go back to my old meds. The story they always gave me that these new meds were the same that didn't sound logical because if they were why the bad reaction. A little research showed they in fact were marginally different , but that little change made the difference. Never the less a few times each year they would subsist generic drugs. So the annual fight always got the drugs back. Point being that under the type system these ACO's will provide will be less than we have not.

Not a surprise for Obama to put this into play and give the repubicans another win. This is the door to killing Medicare in the end , bit by bit. My experience is that doctors are not going to like this one bit, essentially this shifts medical decisions to outside forces that tie the doctors hands.

At this writing I don't have a lot of info as I just found our about this today. One of the things mentioned is to monitor hospitals for readmitting patients within a 30 day period. Pretend your a hospital who now gets rid of patients as quick as they can, if they get punished for having to readmit within the month will only serve for longer hospital stays and a increase in cost.

It is already hard enough to find a good doctor that takes Medicare (not all do) this ACO we know nothing about will make that harder.

MEDICARE WORKS JUST LIKE IT IS- SCRAPE A FEW BUCKS FROM DEFENSE AND PAY FOR IT. HERE'S THE LINK TO THE STORY